


Partner

by mrbinglee



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Book Canon Missing Moments, F/M, Five Times, Future Fic, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Snapshots through the years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrbinglee/pseuds/mrbinglee
Summary: Five times Arya and Gendry dance, and one time they don’t.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 16
Kudos: 132





	Partner

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I ever finished! Just something short inspired mostly by small book canon moments. Characters are GRRM's.

**i.**

Some of the Night’s Watch recruits were telling lies about her father again. Arya wanted to fight them with Needle, but she knew she shouldn’t. She was only Arry the orphan boy here, not Arya Stark, and they wouldn’t take her seriously anyway.

Still, she wanted to hit something.

“Want to fight?”

Gendry stopped polishing his helm and looked at her. “Again?”

“It wouldn’t be _again_ , it would be the first time,” Arya pointed out. “The gold cloaks came to the ivy inn before we could start, remember?”

He stood up, helm in one hand and Praed’s cheap steel in the other. “I told you, Arry, you don’t know how strong I am.”

“I told _you_ , you don’t know how quick I am.” 

She strode off into the woods until she found a clearing where the glow of the campfire was just barely in view. The woods were lit only by moonlight, and seemed very quiet. But then Arya listened with her ears and heard the sounds of the night: the rustle of leaves, the chirp of crickets… and the crunch of Gendry’s heavy feet as he followed her.

“Yoren said not to go far from camp,” he told her.

“We’re not too far.” She gripped Needle in her left hand and slid into her water dancer’s stance the way Syrio had taught her. “I don’t want the others to see me beat you.”

He laughed, placing his helm carefully to the side before taking his own fighter’s stance. “Now you’re really asking for it, Arry.”

They began.

Gendry was strong, but at once Arya could tell he only vaguely knew the fighting style of knights—the iron dance, Syrio had called it, all hacking and hammering.

 _She_ was a water dancer, swift and smooth and sudden. Needle zipped through the air and lightly met Praed’s cheap steel with a satisfying ring; Gendry seemed to have pulled back at the last second. Absently Arya wondered if Needle would break if Gendry’s blow was strong enough. That was silly, though. Needle wouldn’t break; Jon had it made for her. But it wouldn’t hurt to switch tactics.

Instead of bringing up Needle to block Gendry’s next swing, she ducked and twirled and flitted around him, tapping her sword on his shoulders every once in a while just to tease, until at last she spun close enough to hold the pointy end against his neck.

“Ha,” she breathed.

Gendry was breathless too. “Arry, how… where did you learn that?”

“Somewhere where I wasn’t Arry.” Her blood thrummed all the way to her fingertips, and her heart drummed steadily against her chest. She felt alive. 

Arya took a few steps back and slid once more into her stance. 

“Again.”

**ii.**

She slipped in through the forge window quiet as a shadow, but Gendry seemed to know it was her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said without looking up, his eyes and hammer fixed on the misshapen breastplate before him. “You’ll get in trouble if you’re caught.”

“I’m not afraid of Weese,” Arya lied. At Harrenhal, you had to be stupid to fear the ghosts instead of the men.

“Liar.”

“I’m not!”

“Then you’re stupid. I heard what he let his dog do to that boy.”

Arya had seen it with her own eyes. A chunk of a leg.

“Maybe I am a little afraid of him,” she admitted after a moment, since it was only Gendry. “But I’m a mouse, I won’t get caught.”

“Fine, be stupid then,” he scowled, and went back to the breastplate. 

Arya sat on a table and watched. With each stroke against the anvil, sweat dripped from Gendry’s thick black hair into his deep blue eyes.

When he eventually switched out his hammer for a pair of tongs, she saw her chance.

“Will you get me a sword?” she asked.

“No, I told you already, Lucan locks up all the blades.”

“Then… will you make me one?”

The metal hissed as he dipped it into the water. “No, I already told you this too, I can’t just make you one. Lucan would notice and wonder where it was.”

“You could work on it when he and the other smiths aren’t here.”

“No.”

“What about a small dagger, instead of a sword? Would you make that?”

“No.”

“You really won’t?” she frowned.

 _“No.”_

He was such a stubborn bull.

“Fine,” Arya said. “Then I _will_ leave.” 

She climbed out the window and scurried like a mouse along the rooftops. When she was over the kitchens, her eyes spied an old, frayed broom that nobody seemed to use anymore. It would do quite nicely.

Gendry did look up when she came through the window this time.

“You’re back?” He squinted at the shape in her left hand. “What’s that?”

“My sword,” she said, holding it up in the firelight. She’d snapped off the head of the broom; it wasn’t Needle, but it still had a pointy end. “Since you’re too stubborn to make me one.”

Gendry rolled his eyes. “You’ll get in trouble,” he repeated as he started on another breastplate, making the metal sing across the forge.

With steel music in her ears, Arya began her dance. She placed herself in a corner and ran through Syrio’s exercises, enjoying the challenge of adapting them to a smaller space. You never knew how you might have to fight someday.

**iii.**

They were in High Heart again. _We’re never going to reach Riverrun,_ Arya fumed as she climbed back up the hill after making water.

Gendry was waiting for her at the edge of the ring of weirwood stumps. _The first time we were here, we had walked around the hill and counted the stumps together,_ Arya remembered. There were thirty-one. It didn’t matter now; he was leaving her.

“What do you want?” she snapped, pushing past him and climbing onto one of the pale stumps to make herself taller than him.

“I told you sorry a million times,” he said, looking up at her for once. “This is how it has to be, you're just too stubborn to see it. You going to be angry at me forever?

“I’m not angry,” she retorted. “It’s like I told you, go and be an outlaw and get yourself hanged, see if I care.”

For a long moment Gendry looked like he was going to storm off and fume by himself as usual. Then he worked his jaw and said, “You don’t talk to me no more. Ned’s with the Brotherhood too and you still talk to him.”

Arya blinked. What did Ned have to do with anything? _Ned_ never got to share her rabbit leg. Ned never fought gold cloaks with her at the holdfast. Ned never came back to rescue Weasel, never carried Lommy and his yielding leg, never protected her secret as fiercely as if it was his own.

Ned never decided to leave her when he could have decided to stay.

“You and Ned are completely different,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” Gendry said angrily. “M’lady’ll only speak with lords ‘n ladies and not the likes of me.”

Arya was stunned by his fury. It was like Stoney Sept all over again.

“That’s not how I meant it—” she began, but her own fury rose up in her when she saw he was already turning away. She stomped her foot and yelled, “Stupid bull! You don’t get to be angry!” _Not when you’re the one leaving me._

He whirled around, his eyes like blue icicles in the night. “I think I get to be _plenty_ angry!”

“What’re you two rowin’ about?” she heard Tom call out from the campfire. “You’ll wake the horses.”

She and Gendry looked at each other. Arya turned away first.

“Nothing,” she called back.

**iv.**

Gendry found her during the battle. 

He found her, even though she had told him before they reached the Wall that he should worry less about her and more about not letting the undead make him dead.

“I told you!” she shouted. “I told you, it’s no use trying to stay by me if you die in the process!” She stabbed two wights with the dragonglass shortsword Gendry had made her, before ducking so he could hammer a third that had come up behind the fallen ones.

“I told _you,_ Arya!” he shouted back. “I told you when you and Nymeria found me at the crossroads—”

“Behind you!”

Gendry turned just in time to block a wight that was almost as big as him.

There was no more time for talking after that.

Arya sidestepped a wight and introduced it to her pointy end. Without missing a beat, she twirled and greeted another wight, and another and another and another.

In the distance she heard the yells and clangs of the battle, but her own heart beat louder than the rest and drowned it all out. _Not today._

Gendry strived to stay near, at her side or behind her. Arya spun and lunged and slashed at the wights around him, her shortsword in her left hand, but sometimes switching to her right when she had to throw knives to stop any undead that crept a little too close to Gendry’s back. He in turn warned her whenever she needed to duck so he could repay the favor.

Sometimes they ended up drifting apart while fighting—not because they meant to, but simply because of the momentum and steps of all the swinging and lunging. 

Arya didn’t worry whenever this happened; Gendry was strong and capable, and so was she. They always came back together again, as if they were following the steps in one of Sansa's dances at a ball. Arya could never really do _those_ dances well, but this one she could.

The battle felt won, then lost, then won again, but it wasn’t until the sun rose and the undead didn’t that Arya felt they had won at last.

The night was over. It was a new day.

With fevered blood pulsing through her veins, Arya spun one last time—and found Gendry already beside her. Her mind was as wild as the battle they’d just fought, but she had just enough courage in reserve to knock her armor against his and pull him down for a kiss.

**v.**

Nobody minded that Winterfell’s great hall was still half in ruins once the drink began to flow.

The wars—both of them—were finally over, and spring was on its way.

Arya looked out at all the people who survived, and tried to feel—tried to feel happy. But she couldn’t help the dull ache in her chest at the thought of all the people who hadn’t made it through the final battles, and who had been lost even before they had started. She tried to begin the list in her mind but it was just too long.

Suddenly the music seemed too loud, the dances too happy, the room too unbearably warm.

She stood, drawing Sansa’s small frown and Jon’s look of concern. Arya gave each of them a half-smile, and ruffled Bran and Rickon’s hair as she passed them on her way out to the courtyard.

Her lungs filled with calm in the cool night air as she leaned against a wall. 

The creak of the door and the sliver of light bursting briefly into the yard told her that someone had followed her out. The form of the silhouette told her it was only Gendry.

He found her easily, and leaned beside her. They stood there in comfortable silence, listening to the muted music from the hall and the chimes and chatter of people talking and eating and celebrating life.

At some point she reached for his hand, or he reached for hers, she didn’t know.

They might have been there for hours, standing in the cold without feeling it at all, when Gendry spoke.

“Want to dance?”

“I don’t dance,” she replied easily.

“Oh, but you do,” he said, and she knew if she looked at him she would see him smiling in the torchlight. “Want to try a different kind?”

Arya knew what he meant, and her first instinct was to call him stupid, and shove him away. But the fact that he was near enough to shove away—that he was still near, here, beside her after everything—made her slowly turn and circle both her arms around his neck.

“Only swaying,” she warned him.

He laughed as he placed his hands gently on her waist. “‘S all I can do.”

And so they swayed. The music from the hall was just a vague hum now; Arya caught a stronger rhythm when she pressed her head against Gendry’s chest and listened to the steady beat there.

Neither of them could dance properly, but this way of theirs seemed just fine to her.

***

**i.**

They were sitting in the godswood one light grey morning when Gendry opened his mouth, then closed it just as quickly. Arya knew he was biting back his usual proposal.

So she proposed for him.

“Here in the godswood, of course,” she added.

“But your family…” His worried frown didn’t hide the hope in his blue eyes. “I mean, they might not—‘cause I told them no, about being a B—” he cut off his own rambling. “ _Arya,_ are you sure?”

The Arya of years ago would have avoided a straight answer, would have shoved him and called him stupid, because the answer was obvious, wasn’t it?

She was older now, though, and this was a dance she didn’t want to do anymore. She wanted Gendry to know her feelings for true.

“Yes,” she nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.” 

Gendry could barely kiss her properly for how much he was smiling, and in a breath he had her pressed up against the nearest tree. After a blissful few moments, Arya grinned wickedly and flipped them so Gendry was where she used to be, making them both laugh before starting up again with double the enthusiasm.

They were forced to breathe, briefly, at the sound of voices approaching the godswood—but then they were running, smiling and stumbling over each other in their haste to be alone together. Arya didn’t mind when Gendry stepped on her feet. The only dancing partner she would ever want was him.


End file.
